Hotel de Dream (16 page)

Cridge tucked his exercise book away when he had finished reading and nodded in satisfaction. He could hear chairs being dragged from tables on the floor above, and a slight murmur of conversation, and wondered when the bodies of Mrs Routledge and Mrs Houghton would be discovered. Little had Mrs Routledge known, when she had sat on his bed and demanded loyal memories of him, that these were her last moments (he had been surprised, to tell the truth, to see her at all, but supposed the power of the word must take longer in finding its full force than he had imagined). By now, surely, they would be fading away if not actually dead, and he would be a free man. He hoped Johnny and Melinda could be found somewhere in the building and told the good news: it would be tragic if they went on going through the motions of characters in the trilogy when their author no longer existed. This altruistic thought gave Cridge a surge of well-being, and he rose from the bed to go on tiptoe to the foot of the stairs. There was silence from above, and he frowned, drawn by what he knew was a fatal curiosity to go up and examine the scene for himself. Every fibre in his much-invented body told him he should climb out of the basement window, exercise book in hand, and disappear into the night before the police were called to make an investigation of the crime. The discovery of his manuscript could lead only to suspicion and arrest. Yet he climbed the stairs, keeping himself in shadow as much as possible, and peered from the top stair but two at the dining room, and the tables with the chairs set with their backs to the gape of the evil-
smelling basement, and the corner of the door into the hall just visible from where he stood. When he saw what he saw a low groan escaped him, but the guests went on eating unperturbed. The pipes in the Westringham often gave off noises like this. Cridge put his hand over his eyes and felt the first trickle of his tears.

Mrs Routledge was there and was in the act of serving Mrs Houghton with the so-called hors d'oeuvres. Mrs Houghton was smiling graciously up at her. Neither woman gave the slightest impression of ill health—Mrs Houghton, in fact, had blazing eyes and a high colour and as she ladled the cold sweetcorn on to her plate appeared to be staring in a distinctly frightening way at Mr Poynter opposite. Mrs Routledge, satisfied no doubt that her cocktail party the next day was now assured of success, was talking low and fast in the way she had when she felt amply in control of the hotel and her guests. Cridge picked up a few words as his eye roamed round the dining room, settling forlornly on Jeannette Scranton—who seemed dressed to kill tonight, in a sapphire blue evening gown, perhaps she had got the night of the party wrong—and noting with interest that there was no sign of Miss Briggs yet.

“So we had to economise after the war,” Mrs Routledge was saying to Mrs Houghton. “It was a question of pulling down the North West Tower at Jonkers and moving the kitchens closer in, you know what I mean. In the old days, when poor Cridge had to bicycle along the labyrinth of passages in the basement at Jonkers, the food was
stone
cold by the time it arrived!”

The North West Tower pulled down! Cridge thought of his faulty manuscript and groaned aloud. So he had set the murder in the wrong place! Poynter shifted uncomfortably in his chair and muttered something about it being high time the plumbing was seen to here. Mrs Houghton flashed an angry glance at him and Jeannette nodded agreement from her table.

“You could have opened it to the public,” Cecilia said. “It seems such a shame, pulling down part of the country's heritage like that!”

A shame indeed! Cridge cracked the knuckles of his fingers together in rage and exasperation. If there was one thing he had picked up from the novelist in the dreary days of his incarceration in her work, it was that real places must be shown, in order to give a solid background to the actions and emotions of the characters. How could Mrs Routledge and Mrs Houghton have died at the hands of the red-cloaked man when the tower had been rased to the ground twenty years before? His ensuing sigh caused Mr Poynter to throw his knife and fork down angrily and twist in his chair. Cridge sank back into the shadows.

“We thought of that! But Daddy was a little short of cash then.” Mrs Routledge still stood over Mrs Houghton. With her left hand she flung the dish out in the direction of Miss Scranton, who quickly scraped some of the contents off on to her plate before it swung back again.

“And what would have been the point?” Mrs Houghton replied. “The public would have absolutely ruined it, you know.”

“Too many people in the world nowadays,” said Poynter, who was trying to ingratiate himself with Cecilia. (But he could see it was too late, he would never be forgiven for having been found in Miss Scranton's room.)

“All the ancient monuments are in danger of disappearing,” Mrs Houghton said directly at him. “All those feet! People who have no interest whatsoever in the site. Just gone there for a day out. It should be rationed!”

“I think that's what Daddy felt about opening the tower,” Mrs Routledge put in. “He saw the future, decided it was better to pull the lovely place down, you know.”

Miss Scranton sipped at her glass of water. Now she felt that Mr Poynter had long been suppressing his true feelings, that he had come out into the open this evening, she saw
the night ahead with pleasure and anticipation. She was sure something could be done about the horrible women in the City: once two people find happiness, as she and Mr Poynter were bound to do, such obstacles simply had to melt away.

“Schoolchildren need to visit these important sites,” she said in a low voice. “I'm sure Mr Poynter agrees with me there. How otherwise can they learn about the country's past glory and feel confidence in the achievements of their own lives?”

“Where's Miss Briggs?” Mrs Routledge said suddenly, for talk of the glorious heritage had brought her to mind. “It's not like her to be late, is it?”

“In my view,” Mrs Houghton said, “everyone who wants to climb Snowdon should be made to carry a bag of fifty pounds of earth. Then maybe they'd think twice about it!”

“I quite agree,” Mr Poynter said.

There followed a silence. An idea began to creep into Cridge's head. There was only one solution to the riddle of the failure of his manuscript to have the desired effect on these terrible women. It was not yet published! It lay in his exercise book, embryonic, impotent, while he expected the simple writing down of the words to change his world for him. What would the Gospels have been if they had not been copied and inscribed and printed and taken over the world …

“What was that?” Mr Poynter asked testily.

“It sounds as if Cridge is doing something in the basement,” Mrs Routledge said. “It's Thursday tomorrow of course, and what with the party he has probably decided to … well, you know, to empty the pots.”

“I should hope so too.”

“And here's Miss Briggs,” cried Mrs Routledge, who could see that the scene she had witnessed earlier in Miss Scranton's room had caused tensions between the three of them and this must at all costs be avoided before the party. “Well, Miss Briggs, I thought perhaps you weren't going to join us for dinner tonight?”

Cridge, on the floor below, only listened with a part of himself to the sounds in the dining room as he thrust the exercise book inside his shirt and prised open the basement window, the frame rotting and the frosted glass panes opening out into the area where the rubbish stood, this channel of filthy concrete having given him the inspiration for the moat and open casements of his fictional tower. He crept through the aperture, a leg went down on to rubbish, damp and compressed as leaf mould.

“But this is impossible! Miss Briggs, I'm sorry … Well I simply wasn't expecting this at all … No. Do forgive me … Of course …”

Cridge paused, half way on his urgent quest for a publisher. A male voice that by no stretch of the imagination belonged to Mr Poynter was ringing out on the floor above.

“Please don't put yourself out,” it was saying. “I'm afraid all this has been a bit of a shock … what was that, dear lady? Tomorrow night? What was tomorrow night? I wonder if you would be kind enough to tell me where I am?”

A wondering smile spread over Cridge's features. He heard Mrs Routledge make the stumbling introductions.

“Mrs Houghton, Mr Rathbone. Miss Scranton, Mr Rathbone. Mr Poynter, Mr Rathbone. Miss Briggs … of course … you seem to … you know. And you're in the Westringham. As was arranged for tomorrow evening, Mr Rathbone. Miss Briggs, when you bumped into Mr Rathbone and brought him along, I'm afraid you must have been feeling a tiny bit vague.”

The anger and the graciousness mixed brought a gulp of laughter to old Cridge's throat. He swung his other leg over the window sill and crawled through the refuse to the area steps.

“Cridge! Come up here at once! The party is tonight after all! Cridge!”

But by the time Mrs Routledge reached the basement her
trusted servant had gone, manuscript in hand. She went back up to the dining room and the embarrassing scene there and put as good a face on it all as she could.

Marcus Tapp was on his way to London. It hadn't taken long, once the tide had turned and the strange woman who resembled Moira's mother had nodded meaningfully at him on the esplanade at Frinton, for Marcus to run upstairs to his room at the White Horses, shed his waiter's outfit and clip on the grey pigtail needed as a distinguishing mark for his new role as prophet and revolutionary of these stirring times. He stripped to the waist, despite the snowy seaside weather, and painted his torso with initials and astrological signs. He left a brief note for the manager, explaining that the hotel would soon be under water and that this was due to the revisionism and materialism of the White Horse Group; and within ten minutes of the first glimpse of the grey waves rolling in at unaccustomed speed over the beach he was on the main road, his thumb held aloft and the lorries passing him by with no more than a hurled gibe or insult from the drivers at his mute request to be taken into London by them.

Because of this reluctance on the part of the public to hear Marcus's revelations, he soon found that his route was more tortuous than he had hoped. An old lady in an ancient Ford van—thinking he was a Seventh Day Adventist perhaps, or a member of some new sect which would reassure her that the world would end at roughly the same time as she did, took him right across the South of England and deposited him in Devon, where she was planning to spend a week bottling jam with her sister. Although she never went at more than twenty miles an hour, she contrived somehow never to stop; and poor Marcus, for several hours, was put
in the unpleasant position of having to decide whether to jump out and risk minor injuries at this historical moment or to go on answering her fatuous questions until she was finally ready to let him go. He decided on the latter, it would be galling to find oneself laid up in a cottage hospital somewhere while all the comrades were reaping the reward of their long years of patience in the metropolis, and stiff from the jolting of the little car and the old lady's incomprehension of his explanation of British history in the twentieth century, he set out anew from a small village on the edge of Dartmoor, resolving this time to walk rather than be blown hither and thither like a dandelion seed by any passing motorist.

Two good omens however cheered Marcus as he made his way to the city. The first was a Belgian truck, with a driver who stopped for the striding, painted figure without having to be asked and nodded vigorously every time Marcus spoke of the Revolution, although this was the only word of English he seemed able to understand. The second—and this was when Marcus was on the grass verge once again, having found to his disgust that the driver was keen to kiss him on the lips at each slowing down of the traffic at a roundabout or intersection, was when he glimpsed two familiar faces speed past him in the direction of the coast. Even if they were going the wrong way Johnny and Melinda were excellent portents at this particular time. He had followed their exploits in Czechoslovakia and Cuba and Bolivia, and had sympathised with them when their author had forced them to become the feeble puppets of her bourgeois individualistic will. The middle volume, in fact, he had thrown in the fire at his aunt's house, where it had lain against the bars of flickering gas and burned slowly, giving off a sickening smell and hastening that woman's decision to leave all she had to the cats; seeing them now, for however brief a time, and with expressions of such resolve on their faces, showed they were not imprisoned indefinitely in some dreary home and marriage of her
making; that the right people were at least coming out from their hiding places and demonstrating their determination to fight the system and survive.

Marcus's spirits lifted as he trudged on. He was several times given short lifts and was in no way discouraged by being dumped down abruptly when he let his new discovery be known. A prophet in his own country … he spoke of the menacing stillness of the tide, its sudden reversal, and the need to be prepared for the final confrontation. Seabirds seldom glimpsed in the rural depths of Somerset and Dorset bore out his words, flying like albatrosses above the bonnets of the cars and trucks he was allowed for a short time to occupy. At one point, as he was leaving a market town in a Rover driven by a commercial traveller, he even spotted a distant swirl of water, grey against the ploughed fields and short grass of the downs, but his benefactor shook his head, gave an uncomfortable laugh, and shot Marcus on to the verge once more, where he walked on patiently. His only anxiety was that the tide might engulf him before he could reach his comrades and break the news. But by a stroke of luck—and by the time it came to him Marcus was tired and sweating, the painted initials and signs of the zodiac running together in an inky mess on his chest—he was carried right into the west of London by a kind deaf man in a Vauxhall, and let out by the doors of the Kensington Hilton. Backing away from the glaring doorman, he went to the nearest telephone kiosk and reached in his jeans' pocket for his address book. From their hidden nests the old friends and sympathisers would rally to his call. They would storm the communications centres, in all probability, and inform the masses of the great turning of the tide. Marcus would be their spokesman—even, though such a term would not be used, their leader. He smiled to himself as he dialled, still watched with suspicion by the doorman of the Hilton, for it was a cold, sunless day and the nakedness of his torso brought glances of surprise even from his potential followers as they
strolled aimlessly past the box where he stood.